The End of Steam Greenlight

As we recently found out, Valve is putting an end to its “X-Factor service”, Steam Greenlight. Word comes from an article posted on The Guardian that specifically details quite a few of the things that Valve has said about the stopping of the operation of Greenlight.

Developers that wanted their games to go on the Steam store, up to now at least, had to go through a public vote that would basically show Valve if people were interested in the game or not, thus allowing Valve to have an image of how much profit that game dev studio expected out of publishing the game on the Steam market. This is bound to be replaced with a price tag that has yet to be worked out exactly but was quoted to be between 100$ and 5000$. That will obviously change a lot of things for many people’s favourite game’s market engine meaning that this will also have positive and negative outcomes.

One of the article’s most important things mentioned is actually the fact that 38% of the games on the store were released in 2016 alone, showing us exactly the amount of content that Greenlight has allowed to pass through, somewhat unregulated up to a certain point. While this will not of course affect the publishing of platformer no.40152, it will most certainly hurt the indie companies that do not possess the funds to get past the barrier that steam puts up in order to be able to publish on its platform.

The rework of the discovery function as well as a lot of things that were apparently done “behind the scenes” were key to the changing of how the platform operates and approaches customers that are more likely to buy certain products, but at the same time, the fact that there were, too many games coming on the storefront, was most definitely becoming a problem.

The solution will of course come through other platforms, less regulated ones, that although they do not have as much exposure as Steam does, they still provide a good starting place for most game devs. We are most certainly expecting a bigger influx of games on platforms like Game Jolt, Desure and even more on itch.io.

Edit: You can already see one of our chats with a game dev on Facebook’s Indie Game Developers group. It makes sense for game devs to already be concerned about this.